Bad AI Is Becoming a Brand Safety Risk

Consumers don’t seem to mind artificial intelligence. What they’re beginning to reject is artificial mediocrity. As the internet fills with AI-generated noise, the challenge for marketers is no longer simply using AI—it’s protecting the trust their brands have spent years earning.

Not long ago, brand safety meant making sure your advertisements didn’t appear beside hate speech, misinformation or extremist content. Media placement was the risk marketers worried about.

Today, the threat is quieter. It’s not offensive content. It’s forgettable content. Generative AI has transformed content creation almost overnight. Millions of articles, videos, images and social posts now appear every day, many produced in seconds rather than hours. Some are thoughtful. Many are genuinely useful. But an increasing share exists for one purpose only: to occupy search results, satisfy algorithms or produce content at scale.

The internet has already given it a name: AI slop. The problem isn’t simply that there’s more content. It’s that much of it feels interchangeable. Consumers may not know how it was created, but they know when something feels generic, rushed or empty. And that matters far more than many marketers realise.

A global study by DoubleVerify, surveying more than 22,000 consumers across 22 markets alongside over 2,000 marketers, suggests that low-quality AI-generated content is beginning...